Hindrances in HR projects
Usually, an HR project is started as a response to changes in business strategy, as a value-add HR initiative, digitalization of processes, or any combination of these. HR projects are diverse by purpose, nature, duration, available resources, and budget, however, some common critical issues and roadblocks can be present in any HR project. Encounter some of them might require significant efforts and additional resources to get a project back on track, while facing a full set the most probably will be killing for project success.
Stakeholders
Careless or slipshod stakeholder management can bury any project or significantly multiply its complexity. HR projects are not an exception to this general rule. It is well known that even minor changes related to humans might have huge and unforeseen effects. HR projects are dedicated to and dealing with people. Sometimes it is difficult to predict the entire range of reactions of the affected groups and individuals and to build up a complete overview of them.
One of the core steps to success in any HR project is proper identification and intentional management of stakeholders, i.e. groups, persons, authorities, or parties which might have a vested interest in any phase of a project, program or initiative. Often, stakeholders have primary drivers in political, economical, social, technical, and legal areas, which determine their levels of interest in a project. Another important characteristic of a stakeholder is the impact or the degree of his influence on project phases and the result. These two characteristics provide the basis for the stakeholder analysis and help to classify stakeholders in distinct groups, for example, actively manage, manage, actively inform and inform. It is worth noting that the interest and the impact of a stakeholder are not once and constantly fixed values; they sway and might refocus over project phases.
According to the “iceberg model” the invisible part of human internal drivers is significantly deeper than the visible ones, and comprises multiple layers, which in most cases are not purposively showed, but can be triggered at any moment. This is one reason a stakeholder might suddenly appear, who can negatively impact the timing, scope or resources of a project. Another reason is that this stakeholder most likely had that opinion before, you just did not know or did not pay enough attention to it. Therefore, thorough stakeholder management is one of the key success factors for any HR project. In order to diminish a misunderstanding and resistance, proper communication to different stakeholders through relevant channels should be started as early as possible, be transparent, adaptive, clear, and precise.
Culture
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This idea of Peter F. Drucker can be fully applied to HR projects and initiatives, while they are tightly associated with changes on different organizational levels and related to various groups of employees. Besides a variety of reactions on an individual level, which are expected and usually HR professionals are experienced to deal with them daily, roadblocks and favourable factors of the existing corporate culture have to be taken into account at the initial stage of an HR project.
A frozen corporate culture is a very rare case. As a rule, it is in a standing changing mode as a reaction to external and internal impacts and influences. However, the speed and degree of organizational changes are not the same for different companies. Planning an HR project, attention should be paid to an existing organizational development level, an average company’s speed of adaptation to changes, a discrepancy between the existing level and a desired or required one to successfully implement changes, which will be engendered by the project. Some of the common reasons for the failure of ambitious and highly strategic HR projects are a lack of attention to a company’s culture and a realistic estimation of a speed of a culture change. For example, in a company with formal roles within a hierarchy and a high focus on processes and procedures, it is hardly workable in one shot to successfully implement an HR project, which as a pre-requisite requires a culture of shared values, goals, and practices that encourages learning through experimentation. If project outcomes are supposed to go beyond colourful dashboards and superficial presentations, ambitions should be aligned to the reality and the project has to be divided into smaller steps, which can be successfully implemented and stream a step-by-step culture change in the desired direction. Corporate culture is the soul of an organization and can engine, accelerate, and favour strategic and development initiatives. At the same time, it could be a sophisticated killer for any HR project.
Processes
In comparison with culture, processes are more tangible and better-defined stuff. They are a carcass of any complex organization and serve to a chaos reduction and providing of systematic approaches and procedures to deal with both repetitive and unique tasks. Starting from some level of organizational development, processes tend to be integrated, interconnected, and organized into a common system. An effective working system has a good vitality degree to handle manageable interventions, while intentional, but low controlled actions might damage its stability, efficiency, and effectiveness.
HR projects touch and in some cases directly concentrate on processes. At the same time, a comprehensive proactive estimation of influence on the complete range of internal HR processes and adjoining processes in other functional areas is not always a strong suit of HR projects. Lack of such proactive estimation might cause a deterioration of a project quality because of a standing focus shift from the efficient way of achieving the required project outcome to a permanent search for workaround solutions and crutches to close unexpectedly emerging gaps. Such activities often stimulate an appearance of an excrescent substance “a process for a process” and hit a system’s integrity and transparency.
Another critical issue associated with processes and HR projects is solving the dilemmas: keeping a process simplicity vs. ignorance of a bounded complexity and moving beyond an acceptable level of complexity vs. unreasonable simplification. Adherence to one of the extremes might cause miserable results of an HR project, at the same time a rational navigating between alternatives and their derivatives provides better chances for successful project completion.
Capabilities
The last, but not least hindrance for HR projects, is a balanced set of capabilities gained by HR professionals. Hand in hand with strategic HR capabilities, like business acumen, change & transformation, design of HR solutions, etc. has to go a reliable set of functional capabilities and skills aimed to secure top performance of operational tasks and specific project management tasks. For example, the ability of HR professionals to vary communication styles to different target groups to win their propensity can be a crucial factor in the success of an HR project. Communication is one of the powerful capabilities and in a broader sense it is not limited to negotiation and presentation skills, but also has to include the ability to provide business with evidence, facts, results of analyses and fluently discuss them.
The sets of required competencies, capabilities, and skills are not the same for different HR functional tasks and HR projects. My observations show, that often companies assign as project managers HR professionals from the related functional areas, who in most cases are advanced in leadership and other people-relation aspects of project management, however, dispose of very limited capabilities and knowledge of technical aspects of project management, like planning, estimating, scheduling, quality and risk management, etc. A scarcity of critical technical project management skills and capabilities leads to mistakes from the initial planning, through execution to the closeout of an HR project and might drastically affect the project outcome in terms of time, costs, and quality.
To eliminate the roadblock of a shortage of competencies required for successful management and delivery of HR projects and to acquire the desired balanced set of strategic and functional capabilities, HR professionals have to gain and standing master their skills, capabilities, and competencies in the areas of project management, strategic and business management, leadership, and communication. The richer the capability portfolio and better learning skills of an HR professional, the fewer efforts he/she needs to accelerate project management competencies and become a great project manager.
Leading an HR project is not an easy task, while it is important to keep attention on obstacles and roadblocks simultaneously on strategic, tactical, and operational levels. A biased focus on projecting only high-level topics might cause a loss of connections to reality. In opposite, a primary focus on low-level details and minor specifics might cripple the connection to strategic priorities and the ultimate goals of a project. In both cases, the quality of such project management will be noticeable in delays because of unexpected extra-works, shortage of budget, and poor team engagement. To be successful, an HR project manager has to have a birds-fly view of the project’s phases, its interconnectivity within HR and with other functional areas, its alignment with the business strategy and conformity to the features of corporate culture as well as to be able to go down to operational tasks related to a specific HR area or a process.
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